On 2004-06-23, John Summerfield penned: > > I have been to www.apt-get.org and I got Mozilla from here, pine from > there, KDE from somewhere else, Xfree from another... Do you get the > picture?
Well, just to be pedantic, you wouldn't find pine anywhere in debian because of its licensing terms. > A coordinated, official system of official backports would be a fine > thing, and the workforce to do it is already there - they're the > people making these unofficial backports. Yes, but there's no way to test those backports thoroughly enough to match the amount of testing that went into stable in the first place. > Until Red Hat Linux 8.0, Red Hat had two cycles of releases: > > Major numbers, 5.x, 6.x, 7.x maintained binary compatibility. Those > came out with about the same frequencies as Debian releases. And the dot-oh releases were well known to be buggy piles of crap. There was always some nasty gotcha lurking in the system. I don't know why that was the case, but it definitely held true from at least 4 to 6, maybe 7. Somewhere in there I stopped having to care because I switched to Debian. > Then there were the minor releases, x.[0-3] coming out at about > six-monthly intervals. One could take a package from x.2 and install > it with minimal bother on x.0 or x.1, with every expectation of not > breaking anything. > > It's a model Debian would do well to look at and see how it can adapt > it, adopt it. Using this model, Sarge would be 4.0, not 3.1 because it > breaks binary compatibility (new gcc, new glibc). It sounds like a lot more work for the developers. RedHat had commercial customers to support their developers. How would you suggest Debian manage this? -- monique -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]